Chapter 7 The German with a Conscience #3
Then he thought about a girl in Rotterdam, nineteen, glioblastoma, who had been in the second trial cohort and was now in her second year of a degree in marine biology, and whose mother had sent him a photograph at Christmas.
Hansel Brand had two photographs.
He picked up the phone and said eight words to a man named Reiter, and put it down, and sat there another minute.
Then he opened his laptop and began to draft the note to the board explaining that Doctor Wolffe had elected to remain in country for an extended site review, and that in the interim, per section 9 of the shareholders’ agreement, operational authority would sit with the office of the chief operating officer.
He wrote it well. He was good at writing things well.
It took him nineteen minutes, and when he had finished he read it back and found that there was not a single false statement anywhere in it, and that this did not help at all.
At eight forty that night, the Manila Peninsula’s lobby cameras recorded a tall stooped man in a rumpled linen suit crossing the marble at an ordinary pace with two men behind him who were not carrying his bags.
He was not restrained. There was no need for it. He had been shown, on a tablet, in the corridor outside the lifts, a photograph taken forty minutes earlier of a boy of about eight on a plank walkway in Tondo, sitting with a fishing line, and under the photograph a set of coordinates.
Nobody had said anything about the photograph. Hansel Brand had not been present. The man holding the tablet had held it, and waited, and put it away.
So Dieter Wolffe walked out through his own hotel lobby past a pianist playing something from a film, and got into the back of a vehicle on the ramp, and a man beside him apologized, and meant it, before putting a needle into the back of his hand.
The last thing he was aware of was the vehicle turning north.
He knew it was north because of the bridge.
They went up onto a flyover and the rain changed its sound against the roof, and there was a long shallow curve that could only be one curve, and then the surface underneath the tires became bad in a specific way that meant they had come off the elevated section and were running on something older.
Forty minutes, he thought, or tried to think. Forty minutes at this hour in this rain.
Not the airport, then. Not the port.
North, and then east, toward the harbor, toward eighty hectares of reclaimed waterfront, toward ninety-four megawatts and forty million liters a day, toward a channel thirteen meters from a boy with a fishing line.
They were taking him home.
He surfaced twice.
The first time he was upright and being walked, and there was a corridor with a painted floor, gray, with a yellow line down the middle of it and stenciled numbers at intervals, and he thought with enormous satisfaction that he knew that floor, he had specified that floor, it was a two-part epoxy chosen for chemical resistance and it had cost eleven euros a square meter more than the alternative and he had approved it.
Then the corridor became a lift and the lift went down, which interested him, because he had not known there was a down.
The second time he was sitting.
He was in a room about four meters by six with a floor drain and a bench and a door with no handle on the inside, and the walls were unpainted block, and the air had the particular dryness of a space that shares its handling with a machine hall.
There was a fluorescent fitting behind a wire cage.
There was a bottle of water. Somebody had put a folded blanket on the bench, which was, he thought, worse than not.
His shoes were there. His belt was not. His glasses were on the bench, folded, on top of the blanket, which meant a person had taken them off him and put them somewhere he would find them, and Dieter Wolffe sat with that for a while.
He took inventory the way he took inventory of everything.
No phone. No wallet. No passport. Watch gone. Medical alert band still on his wrist, which told him something: they had gone through his pockets and had left the band, and a man who takes a watch and leaves a medical band has been told the contents of that room must remain alive.
And in the small interior pocket sewn into the waistband of his trousers, where it had lived every day since 2021, a hardware security module the size of a car key.
They had not found it.
Dieter sat in a subterranean room under eighty hectares of reclaimed waterfront in Tondo, four hundred meters from a channel that ran warm, with the only key to the only thing he had ever built still on his person, and did the one thing available to him.
He began to count the ventilation cycles.
Eleven minutes on. Four minutes off. Eleven minutes on.
He was, after all, a man who had spent his life measuring things, and a room that breathes is a room connected to somewhere else.
At some point in the third hour he found that he had begun composing the letter to the board in his head, sentence by sentence, and revising it, and that he had gotten as far as the fourth paragraph before he understood that there was going to be no letter, and that he had been doing it in order not to think about the photograph of the boy.
So he let himself think about the photograph of the boy.
It took a while. When he had finished, he wiped his glasses on the hem of his shirt, and put them back on, and went back to counting the ventilation cycles, because eleven and four was a rhythm, and a rhythm was a fact, and a man with one fact is not yet a man with nothing.